Neatx: Google Releases Its Own NX Server

Internet giant Google is now entering the terminal server market. With Neatx, its own Python adaptation of the FreeNX sources, a GPL server has recently become available.

According to a blog-cum-press-release, the search engine wizards have long had an eye on NX. The technological advancement and the licensing under GPL by its maker NoMachine was the impetus.

Google itself calls the Neatx software proof-of-concept. It uses open source from another Google project, Ganeti, a cluster manager tool for virtualization systems such as Xen and KVM. In the medium term Neatx should fluidly remedy virtualized systems and terminal server connections with high latencies, most often the case in mobile wireless setups.

The NX technology was originally developed by Italian company NoMachine, the base libraries having been under GPL since 2003 and also being developed by FreeNX since 2004. A number of terminal server projects such as X2go and OpenNX build on NX.

NX's strength lies in its compression and intelligent proxying, where almost every X event on the terminal server interface has a corresponding compression or caching algorithm available to it. Thus fluid sessions of 5 to 10 Kbits per second are common. The NX client can connect Mac, Linux or Windows with Linux, Windows or VNC servers and brings along a good number of management functions in its commercial version from NoMachine.